Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Bloggers
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1/12 Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Bloggers Affiliate marketing isn’t new, it has been practiced since blogging and internet marketing has been there. Most of the new marketers and enthusiasts will never try to do this strategically, facing losses every day, this post will guide you through some ideas, tips, and techniques on how you can leverage your online income through affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing In a Nutshell:- Affiliate marketing is a form of business in which promotion of third party products take place. Simply put – Affiliate marketing is done by selling the products you haven’t created. You pick an outstanding product, become it’s affiliate and market it in pursuit of making sales. Once a qualified sale is made, you get a fixed percentage of commission. Read here furthermore about affiliate marketing. Type Of Affiliate Programs:- 1. CPC 2. CPA 3. Recurring 4. Bonded You would have heard of the first two, however, the later one may confuse you. Below I’ve explained how all four of them differ and work and after that, we will discuss which one works the best (and for whom). 1.CPC – CPC stands for cost per click. When you join an affiliate program which gives you commission based on CPC, you get a commission whenever a person clicks on your affiliate links, banners or other marketing materials such as custom images and infographics. This term is often used in impression based advertisement sector, however, some affiliate programs do pay with this criteria. 2.CPA – CPA Stands for cost per action. In This mode of Affiliate marketing, you get a commission only when a visitor converts into a paying customer for the merchant you are promoting. That means, the person you’ve referred to the merchant should buy something in order to make your referral eligible for a fixed commission. Examples – WPengine affiliate When you join a program that pays you on CPC basis, it means that you have to drive real customers to that merchant which will do an action such as buying a product, renting a product or giving a lead. 2/12 3. Recurring – Must similar to what the word recurring stands for, The recurring paying affiliate programs are the one which pays you again and again either for a fixed period of time or for the lifetime. This means you have to refer a customer once and then on, anytime the customer renews or extends its subscription, you will be paid a commission. The criteria can be seen on SaaS and hosting affiliate programs which require recurring payment by the customer for using the service. Examples – Social Pilot, cloudways, SEMrush etc. 4. Bonded – This is far most the highest paying and “not so popular” affiliate program commission rule. The bonded commission system goes like this – You refer a customer to an online course or subscription-based product website. The customer then fills up a form and generates a lead and enters in the sales funnel of the company. That’s it. The customer is then bonded to you. Every activity of this customer will be tracked and if any further sales are made by this customer, you will be paid. When an affiliate program pays you on a bonded commission rule, it means that your affiliate commissions will be paid without you doing anything at all. Now that you’ve understood various commission system of affiliate programs, I would further move on to one step closer to the affiliate marketing strategy. Based on the above four types of affiliate marketing, our strategy will be choosing and promoting the products which would pay us recurring commissions. However, it still has a small share in terms of merchants to promote. The most famous and openly practiced affiliate marketing strategy is the CPA. Almost every other merchant has an affiliate program which pays you on CPA basis. What's In There [hide] Making Money from CPA programs Promote The Established Products and Services Email Marketing ( Of Affiliate Products) Sales Funnel Content Marketing Use of Banners (Strategically) High Ticket Products Landing Page Promotion Social Proofing Scarcity Marketing Of Affiliate Products Conclusion 3/12 Making Money from CPA programs Affiliate programs generally pay for Cost per action. to make most out of your sales, you need to make sure you choose products based on certain standards and rules. I follow a couple of rules and set of norms before promoting any product on my blog and below, I’ve shared all of it. Rule 1 – Promote A relevant product Following up on my previous agenda I won’t promote any irrelevant product on this blog. Neither it creates a sale nor it impresses any of the visitors at all. I recommend you to choose the affiliate products very carefully. A few months back, I found an incredible affiliate marketplace called Flexoffers. It’s great to find high paying affiliate programs every niche possible. I searched for WordPress and web services niche on flexoffers and found several affiliate programs including MaxCDN and Popup domination. Promotion of relevant products has been a major contributor to my affiliate earnings. From $200 to more than $1000/month in 6 months of blogging, I have seen a lot of tactics that support you in escalating your affiliate income. It helps my readers to take a better decision as they can relate to the product I am promoting. You can check out my income and traffic reports here. Rule 2 – Cloaked Links Cloaking my affiliates links have given me a sense of peace. I don’t have to fear that my affiliate earnings would be stolen or I won’t be paid for my hard work. I Have discussed it in detail here. It also helps me to track the percentage of valid clicks as well as it provides a branding for external links. With a link cloaker plugin, you don’t have to manually add a Nofollow attribute (which keeps my SEO healthy)to each and every link and this also helps the link management by stacking them into categories. I suggest you add a link cloaking plugin as soon as possible because it will help you to work more efficiently if you start doing it from the very beginning. I am using ThirstyAffiliates on my blog since 2016 and it works great. Here is a step by step guide to cloaking your first affiliate link. Rule 3 – Reputation of the Product, Service or Merchant This is one of the most important aspects to look for before promoting a merchant, product or service on your blog. It might happen that a product may seem to be very promising at first, but what about its performance. Is it accurate enough, is it stands on industry standards, do people love it? 4/12 You should do a thorough research on the past and present of a product you are going to promote and make sure it is reputable enough and stand on its promises. Rule 5 – Buy, Use, Experience and Promote This rule is excellent in making cents to dollars. Before you promote a product, Buy it. Think of this purchase as an investment. Take a few days and discover the inner sides of the product and try to find in-depth pros and cons. After having a first-hand experience of the product, write a detailed review or an in-depth tutorial mentioning the experience and time you had with the product. Add your opinions and tricks and help people better understand the product. Promote The Established Products and Services When it comes to selecting the product for promotion, many affiliate marketers are missing out this strategy. It’s quite tough to generate a sale or even a lead by promoting a fairly new product as an affiliate where all fo your earnings depend on a sale. So what I do is I pick a product from one of my similar niche site that is converting well enough to promote. This helps me to build a relationship with pre-existing merchants that are seeing good results from my niche website and this helps me to get exclusive offers too. Let’s take an example. LongTailPro is a keyword research tool which is has a sales ratio of 16.2 (approx) out of every 100 leads on one of a blog. I see it’s converting very well on some of the blogs that are similar to my niche. Now there is a fairly new keyword research tool KWfinder which is having a lesser sales count and is not converting well enough. In this case, I can confidently promote LongTailPro on my blog. This has helped to verify the quality of the products as well as the need of my readers without spending a single cent. 5/12 Similarly, for hosting, I know Bluehost performs exceptionally well due to it’s attractive and straightforward landing page. I can signup for Bluehost affiliate and promote it without any worries since it delivers the highest quality of service to most of the beginners. This Affiliate Marketing Strategy will work for you forever. Use it and I hope your sales will double at least in 30 days or less. Email Marketing ( Of Affiliate Products) Email marketing is one of the hidden strategies for generating direct affiliate sales faster than any medium. Since the beginning of online communication, email has been a sustainable source to connect with customers and readers. However, List building today is helping many bloggers and online marketers generate thousands of sales with minimal efforts for a long time. The first step to email marketing is setting up an email marketing service.